What Most Fans Don't Know About Kansas

On June 1, 2008, CNN reported that an explosion at Los Angeles' Universal Studios set off a "fast-moving" fire that destroyed numerous movie sets and damaged a video vault. Chief Operating Officer Ron Meyer coolly assured the media that "nothing irreplaceable was lost." What Meyers did not mention was that Universal Music Group, "the world's

On June 1, 2008, CNN reported that an explosion at Los Angeles' Universal Studios set off a "fast-moving" fire that destroyed numerous movie sets and damaged a video vault. Chief Operating Officer Ron Meyer coolly assured the media that "nothing irreplaceable was lost." What Meyers did not mention was that Universal Music Group, "the world's largest record company," had lost over 100,000 masters of music albums comprising "an estimated 500K song titles" that same day, according to The New York Times. The losses included original masters recorded by Kansas. In 2009, UMG officials finally admitted what everyone had feared: that a "huge musical heritage" had been lost.

The loss was disappointing, to say the least, compounded by baffled artists like Bryan Adams, who went searching for his own original material but was met with shrugs by UMG officials. "If you were doing an archaeological dig there," Adams said, "you would have concluded that it was almost as if none of it had ever happened." In 2019, NBC News decided to dig further. UMG officials brushed off the loss, claiming that "of the small amount" left in the vault, most had been digitized. But Susan Rogers, sound engineer for the late musician Prince, explained that digital copies aren't nearly as good as masters because "something will be lost every time you make a copy."

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